Regional and Seasonal Variability of the Oceanic Thermal Skin Effect

Abstract

Abstract The heat exchange between the ocean and atmosphere through turbulent and radiative processes is a fundamental component of the climate system. An accurate representation of the physical processes at the ocean thermal skin layer in numerical weather prediction and climate models is critical to the skill of the model forecasts and the fidelity of derived fields. Over many years we have deployed instruments on many ships to measure the sea‐surface skin temperature and variables that control surface exchanges. Here, the nighttime cool skin and daytime diurnal warming characteristics are investigated using our ship data in the Caribbean region. Overall comparisons with existing parameterizations and models show encouraging results: the biases of various cool skin schemes vary between −0.128 and 0.028 K; a new cool skin equation was derived. Several diurnal warming models are evaluated, with their accuracies being related to the wind speed, time, shortwave‐radiation, and air‐sea temperature difference.